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Marks of the fetish: twenty-first century (mis)performances of the black female body

MARKS OF THE FETISH:
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (MIS)PERFORMANCES OF THE
BLACK FEMALE BODY
by
Terrion L. Williamson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
August 2011
Copyright 2011 Terrion L. Williamson

Marks of the Fetish: Twenty-First Century (Mis)Performances of the Black Female Body considers the discursive formulations and cultural histories of contemporary narratives of black women that coalesce within popular media texts under the following five typologies: the “angry black woman,” the “nappy-headed ho,” the “good Christian girl,” the “strong black woman,” and the “baby mama.” I contend that each of these typologies is a particularized ideation of the black female body that is invested with, to invoke Hortense Spillers, semiological and ideological values whose origins are concealed by the image itself. That is, these typologies mark a fetish object—the black female body—whose history has been transformed into pathology via the very same productive logics that serve to make it articulable within the cultural marketplace. Marks of the Fetish departs from foregoing conversations about “stereotypes,” or what I refer to as “stereotype discourse,” that seek to locate pathology in certain material bodies and/or attempt to position black female iconography along a continuum of negative or positive representations. Instead, I suggest that the typologies I name are not embodied by any particular person or person, but are overlapping narratives for which particular persons stand in. As such, the operative questions I want to engage concern not whether these ideations of black female identity are “good” or “bad,” but rather, how the originary impulses that produce them continue to deceptively foreclose alternative forms of black sociality. Using theories of performative raciality in conjunction with feminist work on the performativity of the gendered body as a starting point, I propose a theoretical methodology for analyzing the constitutive contingencies of race and gender that has the potential to profoundly affect traditional understandings of the representative black body. Ultimately, I argue that the racialized gender performances, and attendant misperformances (that is, performances that deviate from hegemonic norms), of black women within public culture, including within film, television, music, the blogsphere, public and legal policies, and political and social commentary, evidence the fraught terrain of black subjectivity while simultaneously revealing the radical potentialities of difference.

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MARKS OF THE FETISH:
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (MIS)PERFORMANCES OF THE
BLACK FEMALE BODY
by
Terrion L. Williamson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
August 2011
Copyright 2011 Terrion L. Williamson